It was never easy to police Paris. The Parisians, instead of being glad for the help and protection, have always despised their policemen. The contempt has been profound and general. It could be that the Parisians, more than most, don’t want to be told how to behave. A strike, a riot, a revolution, have been their tools of political and social change across the 19th century and well beyond. To say that policing during the Belle Epoque (1870 – 1914) was a martyrdom would be a slight exaggeration but it was a very hard job on a tiny pay. The police staff was recruited mostly from the army and the discipline in the police corps was just as hard, if not harder. The recruits had to have a virginal criminal record. According to the 1880s tariff, the policeman earned 4 francs and 75 cents for an eleven and a half-hour day. In comparison, a maid-of-all-work touched one franc a day. For that pitiful wage, the men had to risk their lives in many wild scenarios that are nowadays shared among different rescue services. In 1884, for example, the statistics show one killed policeman and 144 injured ones.

Let’s have a look at a policeman’s day and the variety of crimes committed in that era:

Strikes of all sorts are still part of the urban life in Paris. They may be less violent than in the past when the police collected bruises in the street

The Belle Epoque Paris faced the threat of various anarchist bomb-throwers. Bombs exploded in the National Assembly, in police stations, in cafés, or simply in the street. Premature explosions also happened, as in this picture

The public, accustomed to the explosion of anarchists’ bombs, reacts to a malfunctioning motorcar

Police had to deal with the raging crowd when a hated criminal was transported. Here they protect Jeanne Weber, a serial child killer

Arrestation of the Sirène de Reuilly. Marie-Thérèse de Gordoue, or simply Gourdon in real life, was a successful courtesan and the head of a large crime organization

Criminal gang members, suspected of snitching, were separated from their noses during a surgery without anesthesia

Shopkeepers, working alone, were often victims of robbery and murder

The Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of the city continues to this day to be the playground of vice and crime. From time to time, the authorities ordered a thorough cleanup.

A police raid in a “hôtel de passe”. These establishments rented rooms on the hour. Considered immoral, they were often visited by the police. Men went scot-free but women caught in the raid were transported to the police depot, and from there to the Saint-Lazare female prison

Escapes and roof chases kept the policemen in good physical condition

The police operated at different height levels. A pickpocket plucked from a tree

At the commissariat, a thief surrenders a watch he had swallowed

Family drama: The father is not dead yet but the fierce competition among the siblings is already in a full swing

A police commissaire is seriously injured in a Paris riot

Another victim of duty, an undercover police officer is shot in front of the Moulin Rouge

Acts of bravery and dedication abounded despite the public contempt for policemen

It takes a lot of effort to become an emperor. First, you have to believe in yourself and your star, which is easy when you are a nephew of the Great Corsican and the heir to his fallen throne. But you also need an endless persistence: the strength to overcome failure, to dust yourself off after a hard fall, and to pursue your goal with renewed energy. Next, you need a lack of moral scruples, the ability to handle people and, finally, a serious heap of money. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte checked off every item on this list except for the last one.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte

When we meet Louis-Napoleon in London, he is an errant prince with a busy past. He had staged two attempts at seizing power in France, was exiled to America for the first one, and imprisoned for life for the second attempt. He has recently escaped from a fortress, where he was supposed to rot, and now he is in London with only his name for a capital. He is thirty-eight years old.

What would you do at this stage of your life had you had these experiences? You and I would be glad to be alive and free, and we would be cured of our mad ambitions. Louis-Napoleon, on the contrary, was incurable and more than able to function in dire circumstances.

Although many unsavory rumors were later fabricated by his enemies, there is sufficient evidence that the prince behaved extremely badly during his American exile, where he was sent with the provision of fifteen thousand gold francs. Indeed, King Louis-Philippe, who then reigned in France, chose to reduce Louis-Napoleon’s first attempt at a coup d’état to a childish prank and he put some hush money into the youth’s pocket. After all, the Bonapartist feeling in France was still strong, and a political trial could rock the boat.

Louis-Napoleon, still in his twenties, managed to squander the money on New York’s whores. After being thrown out of three brothels for misbehaving and out of his hotel for “forgetting” to pay, he lodged with a prostitute and proceeded to live out of her earnings. If the woman’s clients complained about the price, Loulou was there to change their opinion with his fists. He thus ended in detention for assault and robbery. A good lawyer managed to set him free. The same lawyer, after Louis-Napoleon’s ascension to the throne, complained in a newspaper interview that he had never been paid for his effort.

Despite all that, one must not form an image of a lazy and brutal sex-addict. Louis-Napoleon had many intellectual qualities that later helped him in governing a nation. He was attentive and curious, pragmatic, and always willing to learn. During his imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, after the second botched coup d’état, he kept busy producing socio-economic pamphlets filled with progressive ideas that he realized later in life. He also managed to father two male children with the local washerwoman.

Women were not only his strongest interest, they were also the vehicles of his political ideas. Whether they fell in love with his legendary name and title, his romantic charisma, or with the man himself, is difficult to say but Louis-Napoleon never lacked a sweetheart willing to sacrifice herself for his political success. In London, after his escape from prison, that post was filled with Miss Harriet Howard.

Miss Harriet Howard

The daughter of a Brighton shoemaker, Harriet, then aged twenty-three, was a beautiful and refined courtesan, who had amassed a fortune, which she laid at Louis-Napoleon’s feet. Being supported by a woman was nothing new for the prince. Harriet dumped her current rich keeper for him and begun to earn a fat income from attracting clients to a gambling club. For good measure, she also took in Louis-Napoleon’s two small sons whom he had to leave behind in France.

Thanks to Harriet’s industry, Louis-Napoleon was able to lead a comfortable life. Again, he kept busy writing. This time, he was correcting his manuscript The History and the Future of Artillery and producing a study on an economically profitable canal in Nicaragua. He also kept current on the news from France. On February 26, 1848, he learned that there was a revolution in Paris.

The 1848 revolution painted by Alphonse de Lamartine

There had been nothing drastically wrong with King Louis-Philippe’s government but, since the First Revolution, the French people became accustomed to uprising for real or imagined wrongs. This time, some clumsy government actions and a couple of moral scandals resulted in a riot which accidentally turned into a revolution. Not knowing what was wrong, and therefore unable to do something about it, Louis-Philippe gave up and, while the revolutionary mob was ransacking the royal palace of Tuileries, he bought a boat ticket for England.

Crossing the Channel in the opposite direction was Prince Louis-Napoleon with Harriet’s fortune. He would need it to finance his candidacy in the first electoral campaign in the French history. This time, everything went well for the prince. His name worked magic, and his innovative social and economic ideas spoke for him. He was elected to be the first president of the Second Republic. He would also be the last one. At the end of his four-year mandate, he would stage his third and successful coup d’état to put the imperial crown on his head under the name of Napoleon III. The Second Empire would last for eighteen prosperous years. Until the next revolution . . .

Napoleon III (same man, improved wardrobe)

And Miss Harriet Howard in all this? After having financed an enormous electoral campaign, Harriet was often seen in the Prince-President’s company but she was never invited to the Elysée Palace where the official business took place. The post of the First Lady was occupied by Louis-Napoleon’s cousin, Princess Mathilde. Still, Harriet kept hoping that her day would come when her lover would carry the imperial crown. Four years later, when no invitation came from the Tuileries Palace, the seat of the newly-formed imperial court, Harriet decided that she would wait no longer. She went there uninvited. It was the first, and the last time she appeared publicly in the emperor’s presence.

What happened next would have happened anyway but Harriet’s initiative did speed up the process. The next day, her dear Loulou came to visit her, which was not unusual as they maintained a warm relationship, but this time he offered her an official mission to England. He provided her with a list of persons whom she should visit to establish a good relationship between England and France. Thrilled to be named a goodwill ambassador, Harriet accepted to leave at once. When she and her escort reached the seashore, bad weather prevented them from boarding their ship. While waiting for the weather to clear, Harriet purchased a newspaper where she read the announcement of the emperor’s engagement to Eugenie de Montijo. She returned to Paris at once.

Back home, she found her apartment in disorder, with the upholstery slashed open and her desk taken apart. All compromising correspondence was missing. In the end, Harriet fared better than the unpaid New York lawyer. She received a hereditary title, becoming the Countess de Beauregard, and retired to her country chateau of the same name. At her request, she continued to care for the washerwoman’s little boys.

James Tissot (1836 -1902) was a painter known on both sides of the Channel as he spent important chunks of his life both in England and in France. Born as Jacques Tissot to a prosperous merchant family in Nantes, Brittany, he decided to pursue an artistic career despite his father’s misgivings. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and, in 1859, aged only twenty-three, he already exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon. He began with depicting the Middle Ages but soon moved to the portrayal of fashionable life, where he excelled. Tissot’s name is evocative of pleasing paintings of pleasing people in pleasing situations. In the 1880s he produced a series of paintings called La Femme à Paris. We had already seen one of them—and the story it depicts—in the post Without a Dowry. More of the series paintings follow here.

With nearly 600,000 visitors every year, Moulin Rouge is in the top ten must-see items on the tourist’s list. Located at the bottom of a hill in the Montmartre neighborhood—then a semi-rural setting favored by artists—Moulin Rouge opened its doors in 1889 to offer champagne-filled parties during which remarkable dancers and singers performed. Very soon, the establishment became world-famous for a scandalous dance called the can-can. No one has described the can-can in better words than Mark Twain here.

With enough champagne bottles emptied, spectators found themselves willing participants on the dance floor that was installed to admire the performers up close. The great painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, immortalized these scenes of night-time delirium in some of his famous works. It is mainly thanks to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, that the two most colorful Moulin Rouge dancers remain in our consciousness.

Moulin Rouge’s top star La Goulue with the silhouette of her dance partner Valentin the Boneless

No less popular is this Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster featuring Jane Avril

The two women had only one thing in common: they both excelled on the dance floor. La Goulue, low-born and vulgar, was the prototype of the working-class girl found in the dancing halls. Louise Weber—her real name— was born in 1868 and passed to posterity as La Goulue for her greedy behavior: she liked to empty the guests’ glasses that stood within her reach. The other dancers did not fare any better as to the choice of their nom d’artiste. There was the Cheese Kid, the Sewer Grid, or Nini the Paws-in-the-Air. This joyful band was not impressed with royalty. “Hey, Wales,” La Goulue addressed the heir to the British throne, “the champagne is in your name so is it you who pays or is your Mama [Queen Victoria] inviting us?”

La Goulue’s sensual, provocative body corresponded to the taste of the time that appreciated generous femininity.

La Goulue entering the Moulin-Rouge. 1892. Lautrec painted her with a smirk on her face that is difficult to interpret: is it the arrogance of a diva or simple tiredness?

Toulouse-Lautrec remained La Goulue’s friend well after her triumphs. In this picture, they sit side by side with La Môme Fromage (the Cheese Kid) opposite

Soon, La Goulue ceased to please and turned to her painter-friend for help. Now self-employed, she would sell her renown in the fairgrounds. To recall her prestigious past, Lautrec painted two large panels exposed on the front of her fairground hut. A few years later, when in debt, she had to sell these panels and they were cut into smaller canvasses by a greedy merchant. In 1929, they were bought and restored by the Louvre and can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay.

La Goulue’s fairground hut with panels painted by Toulouse-Lautrec

The next adventure began in 1900 when La Goulue married. With her husband, a magician in trade, she learned to tame wild beasts. Unfortunately, they were both assaulted during the show.

By that time, La Gouloue’s life was on a sharp downward slide. Her husband was shot in 1914, the victim of a German bullet in the WW1. Her son, who she claimed was fathered by a prince, died at 27.

La Goulue with her son Simon

She lived miserably in a caravan, where she gathered ailing circus animals, and she returned to the Moulin Rouge for financial support. She was allowed to sell peanuts and cigarettes on the sidewalk. Now and then, she’d get drunk and shout: “I’m La Goulue! Can’t you see it? I was the greatest star here!”

The newspapers announced La Goulue’s death in 1929.

Jane Avril by Edgar Chahine

Jane Avril, charcoal sketch by Picasso

Born near Paris, but seemingly coming from another planet, was Jane Avril, the other celebrated Moulin Rouge star. Strange and mysterious, she did not need the raw sensuality of La Goulue to seduce her audience. She’d come and go as she pleased –no salaried employment for her—and simply danced with every nerve in her body. Except for that, she had nothing in common with the other dancers. They did not understand her and they did not like her. For them, she was Mad Jane. But Mad Jane did not care. She found her friends and lovers in intellectual circles. She could marry if she wanted to for there were willing takers but she loved her freedom.

Her story of an enfant-martyre explains a lot. Born Jeanne Beaudon, in 1868, to a Second Empire courtesan, and fathered by an Italian aristocrat to whom she was an embarrassment, she was first brought up by her maternal grandparents. Her life took a turn for the worse when her sadistic mother decided that Jane should live with her in Paris. She was nine when she entered hell. Today, Jane’s mother would be identified as a dangerous psychopath but the science in Jane’s childhood did not yet reach that stage. Nor did the social services function as they do today. The children, then, were the property of their parents. Several people knew that Jane was beaten at least twice a day for invented offenses, but none reported the abuse to the police. It was just not done. The constant stress had to show somewhere and Jane developed a chorea minor, then referred to as Saint Vitus Dance. It is a nervous disorder characterized by rapid, involuntary jerking movements. At fourteen, she ran away from home. Finally, she found herself in a madhouse and happy as a lark. One can fully appreciate the degree of her suffering when a child finds the madhouse a step above her home.

In her biography, Jane relates that during a musical entertainment at the hospital, she suddenly got up and began to dance. In front of her audience’s eyes, she changed from a timid, shivering nonentity into a graceful nymph. Her condition improved and, soon, she was released to her mother’s care. She ran away—for good— at sixteen to live with a student. She gave all of herself to this first love, only to find herself betrayed. This was too heavy a load for her fragile constitution. Immediately after the discovery, she ran toward the Seine to jump from a bridge. A prostitute talked her out of the idea. Jane spent that night in a brothel. The next day the inmates went to a public ball, taking their new protégé with them.

The public ball was Jane’s second awakening. From then on, her life became divided in two: a day job to keep her from hunger and a night life to keep away her demons. Her talent led to prestigious theatrical engagements when an exceptional dance number was needed and, for a time, she was the ambassador of French can-can in London and in Madrid. Her poise, grace, and intelligence made her a welcome guest at dinner parties. A friend of novelists, dramatists, artists, philosophers, and scientists, she also captured the heart of Toulouse-Lautrec who saw in her a sister soul. He too was a victim of physical suffering. He, too, had an unusual childhood. They remained friends until the painter’s premature death.

Such was Jane Avril’s status in the world of entertainment that her presence in the audience recommended any show (poster by Toulouse-Lautrec)

In her forties, Jane finally settled down to sixteen years of quiet married life. She died in 1943 at the age of seventy-five.

The sidewalks of Paris were populated by merchants of all kinds. A witness to his time, Victor Gilbert painted the city markets with their profusion of colorful flower stalls, displays of raw meat or bowls of steaming soup. His sensitivity to detail is evident in every scene. His naturalistic paintings are valid documents for today’s study of street life in the late 19th century Paris.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert in his studio

Victor Gilbert was born in 1860 as an apprentice to a decorative painter. In the evening, he attended art classes under the direction of Father Levasseur at the École de la Ville in Paris. He began his career at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1873. He earned a second class medal at the Salon of 1880 and a silver medal at the 1889 World Exhibition. He became a member of the Society of French Artists in 1914. Victor Gilbert was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1897 and was awarded the Léon Bonnat Prize in 1926.

Like this:

A blook? I bet your reaction was “Huh?” as was mine when I first heard that word. That happened two weeks ago and, yesterday, the mailman brought me a fairly heavy parcel which contained my blook. Since yesterday was also my birthday—a very round one—I could have hardly received a better gift.

You, too, can have a blook, assuming that you have a blog (who doesn’t?) and a valid credit card. Made of time and energy, a blog is a body without substance, which is in danger of disappearing should the technology that keeps it together break down. I had that thought several times in the past, telling myself that I should print the posts or at least save them, but I failed to find the time. Never mind now. The blook is here to save us from possible cyber-annihilation.

So what do you do to get a printed book out of your blog and how long does it take? Assuming, again, that your blog needs no serious editing, and that you need no help with the cover design, the whole process of uploading and pdf-churning takes about ten minutes. The result is a high-quality printed version of your blog plus a free epub edition to read on your phone or tablet while awaiting the delivery of the real thing.

You can choose a program-generated cover design or make your own

Careful with the captions: if you add them as an afterthought, they will format into narrow columns. I had to part with several posts rather than to start over

I would wish for a better use of space here but considering that no human hand handled the page, it looks acceptable

A postcard stamped with the words Sommet de la Tour Eiffel was a proof that the sender had made it to the top

The Eiffel Tower, the unmistakable symbol of Paris, is 128 years old and, with seven million paying visitors a year, it is the most profitable monument in the city. Like all stories, the story of the Eiffel Tower is not without controversy. In the beginning, the odds were against this “odious pillar of bolted metal” as in here:

[…]Imagine for a moment a vertiginously ridiculous tower, as well as a gigantic black factory chimney, overlooking Paris, crushing with its barbaric mass the Notre Dame , The Sainte Chapelle, the Saint-Jacques Tower, the Louvre, the dome of the Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all our monuments humiliated, all our architectures dwarfed, which will disappear in this astounding dream. And for twenty years we shall see spreading over the whole city, still vibrating with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see the odious shadow of the odious pillar of bolted metal spreading like an inkblot.[…]

Thus protested, in a petition published in 1887, the top painters, sculptors, music composers, writers, and other lights of the French cultural elite. Boy, were they wrong! For a start, the tower outlived the twenty years of its proposed duration thanks to its adaptability. It was used for scientific experiments (radio signals from the tower to the Panthéon in 1898), it served as a military radio station in 1903, it facilitated the first public radio program in 1925, and, finally, it adapted to the television signal. As for the ugliness, the 300 petition signatories could not have been more mistaken. What other architectural object in Paris had been inspiring more artistic creativity in painting, poetry, and music? Besides, the petition came too late as the tower had already been under construction for a month. At the time, the project had no other purpose than to showcase the French technical and engineering ability at the 1899 World Fair.

The projected site of the 1899 Paris Universal Exposition on the Champ de Mars

The 1000-foot Tower envisaged for the Philadelphia Universal Exhibition, its height compared to that of the main monuments of the world

The idea of a one-thousand-feet tower came from the United States, where such a project was envisioned for the Philadelphia World Exposition and rejected as impossible to realize. It is well-known, at least among the French, that “l’impossible n’est pas français.” A concourse was launched for a tour with a square base of 25 meters and the height of 300 meters (approx. one thousand feet). The project went to the firm of Gustave Eiffel, whose two engineers, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Kœchlin, were at the origin of the design.

The first sketch of the tower by Maurice Kœchlin

The construction began on January 28, 1887. Standing 984 feet high upon completion on March 15, 1889, the Eiffel Tower became the world’s tallest structure. It kept that honor for 41 years until the Chrysler Building topped it out in 1930, standing at 1,046 feet.

The tower weighs 10,100 tons and comprises 18,000 metallic parts joined together by 2.5 million rivets. It is possible to climb to the top, but there are 1,665 steps. Most people take the lift.

Repainting the tower, which happens every seven years, requires 60 tons of paint. The color of the tower is not uniform. It has three distinct shades of the same hue. The darker is applied near the ground, the lighter covers the upper parts. This is done in order to limit the visual impact of the tower against the Parisian sky.

The tower base with the Trocadéro Palace, which was demolished in 1937 to make room for the Palais de Chaillot

Nowadays the color is bronze, but it is not definitive. Indeed, between two painting projects, visitors have the opportunity to give their opinions on the color to be taken for the next painting job. Of course, they have no choice between red, green, yellow or blue, but between different shades of brown-brown-bronze. There is a suggestion box on the first floor of the tower that receives these choices. Initially, the tower was brown-red. Later, it took on a yellow-ocher tone before finding its definitive color in the brown palette.

After the completion of the tower, and after having witnessed its success, most of the distinguished petition signatories apologized for their short-sightedness. However, Guy de Maupassant made it his honorable duty to frequently dine at the feet of the tower, which was—according to him—the only place in Paris where the structure could not be seen.